natural primer reading

i really liked the Natural Primer reading (not in small part due to the fact that economics is doesnt make sense). the idea of using backcasting, instead of forecasting, is something i have always wondered why people dont just do. looking into the past to guide you into the future can only go so far before it becomes useless. just because something didnt work before doesnt mean it wont work now, and conversely, just because something did work before doesnt mean it will work again. forecasting seems to be seeing a problem and looking at previous solutions to follow again without giving much thought to where we'll end up. it just seems to me that if the problem is similar enough that you can compare possible solutions chances are if you have the same problem again the same solution will not fix it permanently. but if we look forward to where we want to end up our chances of coming up with an appropriate solution are much better.

i always love reading about how things are connected. how doing something in one place affects what happens somewhere else. it makes me think back to what Fritjof Capra said "we cannot understand our problems in isolation." nor can we hope to fix our problems in isolation. if we try we only end up with a problem somewhere else.

Sustainable Development

The reading for Monday talks a lot about environmental justice again, and it brings in a lot of the realities of environmental economics, and how we as a westernized society are favoring a certain group of people while degrading our environment and injuring many people of this world who have to deal with our environmental selfishness. I like how Mr. Schumacher talks about Buddhist Economics because I think that this is a way that we can start working together to manage the resources that we have left, and work towards a sustainable future. I believe that we have to start doing something now by integrating our economy into this equation, and working towards a better set of ethics.

I like the article called Natural Step Primer a lot because it talks about sustainable development, and I think that that they really hit the nail on the head here with what we need to do for the future. They define sustainable development in the article as being “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This reminds me of the Seventh Generation company that holds its philosophy in preserving the Earth for seven generations to come. This is the way that we need to run our economy.

They also mention in this article the problems we are having because we are not being sustainable and that we all have the same fate because of our lack of awareness and action towards taking care of our environment. There are going to be drastic changes that come because of our limited fossil fuel resources, but I do not want to get to that point. I want to start now and fix some of the problems that we have created, so that my children and grandchildren will not ask me why I got to experience such beauty in the natural world and they did not. I am willing to give up things that I personally enjoy such as decreasing the length of my showers and their frequency, because water is going to become a huge problem of the future. I will be willing to give up my car, because it is not a "right" in my opinion. I think a lot of people feel that they are entitled to things, and this runs on our materialistic culture as they discussed in the economics section. We are going to have to eliminate this, and learn to work together as Mr. Schumacher mentions in his Buddhist Economics theme, or things are just going to continue to get worse.